always work out that way"). "Never touching the Hot 100" as Pitchfork Ryan Dombal noted Fawbert saw it taking "another nine-and-a-half years" to reveal its impact over the course of the decade after "slowly unleashing its tentacles and hooking itself around the music world." The song "heralded the end of the glitzy, VIP-filled, champagne-drenched 'Club' era of songwriting" in Fawbert's view, and it "changed the trajectory of pop, indie and dance." Insider Callie Ahlgrim wrote that the song "served as a lodestar for so much of this decade's pop" when "the best work of countless female pop stars" that followed "bears the mark of Robyn's signature poptimism". Ahlgrim said that, without Robyn's influence, there would be "no Carly Rae Jepsen, no Charli XCX, no Lorde." Max Martin's manager said that Martin thought "Dancing On My Own" was "one of the best pop songs ever made," and years later at a dinner he told her that he continued to have a "lot" of female artists come into his studio, "...put your album on the table," and say, "I wanna make this!" Robyn described his response as "Well, fuck you, go work with her then!" which she found "very sweet." In October 2020 The Guardian Alexis Petridis detailed the track's "brilliant electronic rebooting of the old disco trick whereby euphoric club music is paired with lyrical despair" and Pitchfork Jamieson Cox saw a similar dynamic when comparing her output to fellow Swedes ABBA for a September 2019 retrospective of their iconic greatest hits compilation released in 1992, expressing that she "became one of this decade's great pop heroes by pinning down that same sad-ecstatic balance and welding it to modern, muscular production." NBHAP Norman Fleischer also felt ABBA's anthem "Dancing Queen" had "finally found a proper successor" in Robyn's track. Seeing the domination over the music landscape by the close of the 2010s of this kind of song "whose instrumental sets you up for good times, only to sucker punch your heart with lyrics of Biblical sadness," BBC Mark Savage solely credited Robyn and the single, arguing the "sad banger" had clearly "influenced an entire generation of songwriters." To that end, Lorde shared with Vice her "friendly fixation" with Robyn, including keeping a framed portrait of her on the piano during her performance of "Liability" on Saturday Night Live and in the studio as a "patron saint" to watch over the Melodrama